» Generally, the word Gaussian pertains to Carl Friedrich Gauss and his ideas. GAUSSIAN's a computational chemistry software program initially released in 1970 by John Pople and his research group at Carnegie-Mellon University as Gaussian 70. It's been continuously updated since then. The name originates from Pople's use of Gaussian orbitals to speed up calculations compared to those using Slater-type orbitals, a choice made to improve performance on the limited computing capacities of then-cur… (More on Gaussian)